


The Costume Won’t Eat Your Brain (Probably)

by Teyke



Series: Cap-IM Bingo fills [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Surprisingly Fluffy, Temporary Character Death, comics-inspired crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:32:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4692212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Superheroing is a dangerous job. People die. And then they come back... again, and again, and again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Costume Won’t Eat Your Brain (Probably)

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in a universe where Tony and Pepper are not currently together. Thanks to anti_grav vector for the beta; all mistakes that remain are, of course, all my own. 
> 
> (Written for the '(temporary) character death' square on my bingo card.)

Superheroing is a dangerous job. Nobody’s gonna argue against that. They’re the best in the world, but they take on the absolute worst. It’s a risky business, and the standard was set decades ago by the very first superhero, Captain America himself, dying to save the world. They’re all experienced men and women. They know the risks they run.

What nobody thinks about until later is that Cap set a different sort of standard, too: he came back.

 

They make it through an alien invasion and a year of hunting down Hydra without any of the team dying, and they attend the public funerals for the civilians that weren’t so lucky, and Tony dreams about alien stars and something _bigger_ on the other side. He locks himself in his workshop and builds and builds and builds, and this time the threat is his own fault, except for the part of it that’s Wanda’s, but she’s the one who pays in the end, not him, when Pietro goes down.

 

“Pietro’s back,” Steve says as soon as FRIDAY puts the call through. 

_“What.”_

 

Tony’s tower is a lot closer than Seoul, so he gets to the new SHIELD base well before Dr. Helen Cho, who is really the person everybody’s waiting on: tissue regeneration, natch. Pietro, though, is fine, kind of a dick, pretty confused at digging himself out of a grave, and pissed he had to run halfway across the world to find his sister. By the time Tony gets there the kid’s eaten about twenty burgers and is sitting with Wanda tucked against his side, trying not to look like he’s cooing over the videofeed of little baby Nathaniel Pietro. (He is totally cooing.)

 _“What,”_ Tony says again, stopping short.

“Clint’s flying out, he’ll be here soon,” says Steve, popping up from _fucking nowhere_.

“You’ve been taking stealth lessons from Natasha, haven’t you?”

“No, you were just distracted by the mist in your eyes.”

“Tears of manly joy,” Tony says, and tries not to note that he’s actually dry-eyed. No time for the relief of _thank god I didn’t get this kid killed after all_ when the better part of his brain is thinking _how_ and _can we do it again_ and trying to ignore _monsters_ and _we’re mad scientists._

 

“Are you going to call Bruce?” Steve asks. Tony gives him a look. Steve misinterprets it, and adds, “Oh, please, Tony, like you wouldn’t find him.”

“Of course I found him. Just not sure he’d want to share in the family joy, here.”

 

Natasha’s never asked him about tracking down Bruce, although he knows SHIELD’s been keeping an eye out. He didn’t even have to hack them to find out: he’s funding them now, he can demand all the updates he wants. (He hacked them anyway, just on principle.) But then, they don’t know Bruce as well as he does. And none of the SHIELD techs have a personal motivation.

 

In the end, the best minds in the world (sans Bruce) have to chalk it up to _enhanced metabolism with still-undefined parameters_ which really means _you let them turn you inside out with the mind gem, what did you expect_ and _no, we don’t know if it’ll happen again, don’t try it_.

“So basically you’ve got no idea,” says Steve. He doesn’t sound happy about it, but he doesn’t sound surprised, either.

“Yeah, basically,” Tony sighs, and raises his bottle of beer. “To lucky idiots.”

They clink bottles.

 

There’s another dead kid, a costume-wearing kid, who none of them knew was a kid until the paramedics ripped the mask off his face so that they could try and pump oxygen into failing lungs. They’re drinking whisky this time instead of beer, except that Tony’s still nursing his first glass while Steve’s downed most of the bottle, because it was Steve that the kid dove in front of to save, and Steve who got covered in blood.

“I wish he hadn’t,” says Steve, and his voice cracks more from grief than drunkenness, because fuck, he doesn’t even get that, does he?

 

Five months later there’s a spider... queen... thing, and a hell of a lot of sticky goo, and some other even uglier fluids, and suddenly Parker’s back, covered in slime and more traumatized from being reborn out of an alien arachnid than he is by dying and having his corpse turned into a spider-baby repository. (Tony has to work not to gag every time he thinks about it.)

Steve smiles for the first time in months.

 

Natasha pushes Steve out of the way of a sniper’s bullet (this looks like it’s becoming a thing, and Steve doesn’t speak for three days, during which Tony redesigns and reinforces everyone else’s suits and fuck it, wouldn’t it be better just to stick them all in armour? You don’t see _Rhodey_ getting shot when he dives in front of bullets to save a teammate). Then on the third day she pops out of a swirly blue vortex because apparently _time bullets_ are a thing, and the Avengers come down like the wrath of gods on Crossbones, who points them to the Red Skull, who apparently didn’t die _either_.

They’re more thorough about it this time.

 

Then there’s some purple dick with a serious underbite problem, and Steve’s left holding Mjolnir because Thor just took a blast to the chest from the Power Stone and, as a result, no longer _has_ a chest, and when Steve dives forward Tony thinks _no no no_ and does so as well, shoving Steve out of the way at the last second before _pain,_ such shocking pain that he can’t breathe, or maybe his lungs were just disintegrated.

The last thing he sees is Mjolnir coming down on the Time Stone, and then –

 

“Okay, _what?”_ Tony asks.

“You do that again I’m gonna kill you myself,” says Steve, and kisses him.

(Thor is looking between Steve and Mjolnir, his expression both pleased and betrayed. Tony will make fun of him some other time.)

 

Loki comes back. (They find out about this afterward from Thor. Apparently he never really died.)

Stane comes back. (Something something cloning, Tony would be paying more attention if he weren’t so fucking _pissed_ that he can barely think straight. He buries Stane in the deepest, darkest hole that SHIELD can find, and tosses his son Ezekiel in there after him; if Zeke loves daddy dearest so much, then he can fucking spend some time getting to really know him.)

 _Vanko_ comes back, and after they manage to blow him up again, Tony demands, “What the fuck, is everybody who ever put on a shitty costume going to come back to life?”

 

(In his defense, he really _didn’t_ see the CNN truck.)

 

Shitty costume sales increase by about a thousand percent. The merchandizing line of Stark Industries pulls in more profit than the energy sector, which deeply annoys Tony. He’s got no idea how ‘Stane 2: Son of Stane’ has turned into ‘costumes make you immortal! Or at least more likely to become a zombie’ has turned into ‘heroes never really die (so long as they ~~are remembered~~ had a costume on)’, but – no, that’s a lie, he knows exactly how and can explain it in one word ( _internet_ ).

“This is a problem,” says Steve.

“No shit, Captain Obvious.”

JARVIS (because it turned out that there was enough to reconstruct him after all, it just took FRIDAY a while because she didn’t want to get Tony’s hopes up if it didn’t work; Tony still can’t decide if he should add this to the dataset) is running the news for them. Top stories all week have been about the sudden superhero craze – some of whom appear to be actual enhanced metahumans, many of whom appear to be kids with questionable sewing skills, and a few of whom have absolutely no regard for privacy laws and have gotten themselves arrested for breaking, entering, and general vigilantism.

“They’re a bunch of kids,” says Steve. “They’re all gonna get killed. We have to stop this.” There’s a stress-note in his voice that is too obvious, too close to breaking, because Steve’s had too many people die on him, _for_ him, and Tony would ordinarily be paying attention, would wrap his arms around Steve and try to distract him or at least hold him, _but –_

“Actually,” says Tony. “Maybe we don’t.”

He’s staring at the bottom-left screen, which has just had a new headline pop up: UNDERAGE SUPERHEROES RETURNED FROM DEAD – subheadline: _Teenage vigilantes killed in earlier gang shootout return to life, reunite with tearful parents_.

 

Steve’s shot in the head on a Monday. It is the worst twenty-four hours in Tony’s life.

Doom resurrects him the next day, trumpeting something about unbalance in the afterlife and blah blah favours Richards blah something that would offend Tony’s sensibilities blah blah, except he’s too busy kissing Steve to care.

 

DEATH RATE PLUMMETS, CRIME FALLS, read the headlines.

Apparently it’s not enough to put on a costume. You have to try and _do_ something with it, whether for good or evil. This results in a string of robberies by brightly-dressed idiots, who are immediately apprehended by a whole bunch of other brightly-dressed idiots. Casualties are horrific, because the second group almost never has guns and the first group always does. But it turns out there's about five times the number of people who want to be superheroes compared to the number of dicks out there, and there's a lot more to be said for zerg-rush tactics when the zerglings can't die.

Hospitals start using standardized forms for ‘dead while superheroing, got up an hour later’.

To be fair, it makes things a lot easier when Rhodey finally _does_ go down (because he wasn’t fully armoured, the idiot, dumbass  _idiot)_ and then climbs back up bitching about getting the blood stains out of the armour, like Tony would ever let him wear that version again, oh no, it’s time for _upgrades._

 

BIRTH RATE FALLS IN INDIA, says another headline, and below it is a picture of a smiling woman in a poor rural town, with three little kids wearing – Tony squints. He’s not really sure what the costume is. Each of the kids is carrying a sign with something in Hindi, which FRIDAY informs him reads ‘Babies against dysentery’.

 _“Involuntary activism appears to count, sir,”_  says JARVIS. _“So long as it is done while costumed. Infant mortality rates are plummeting around the globe.”_

 

“But what _is_ it?” Tony wails to the heavens. Reed’s got nothing. Strange is baffled. Xavier looked into it being a mutant influence, and shook his head. Thor assures them it’s not alien. Even Bruce, after he's done shouting at Tony for tracking him down and kinda-stalking him for six months, admits that he's been trying to figure it out and has gotten nowhere. Possibly, if superheroing hadn’t gone viral, they’d never have realized what's going on: their lives are dangerous as shit, but also weird as hell. If sometimes they get lucky, well, it breaks even in the end.

Except it doesn’t. Everything’s coming up smiley faces and fuzzy bunnies, all around the globe, and Tony’s getting pissed off at himself for being pissed off about it, but it doesn’t make _sense._

“Cosmic radiation? Act of god? A fucking _curse?”_ he snarls, and throws his tablet across the room.

Steve wraps an around his waist from behind and kisses his cheek; mostly on reflex, Tony turns so he can get a second kiss on the mouth. “Maybe,” says Steve, “we should just count our blessings.”

**Author's Note:**

> Answer: it’s an act of god. (Aka, yes, this fic is nothing more than poking fun at superheroes being unable to stay dead.) Poor Tony, I’m sure he’d hate that answer.


End file.
